Sweet guitarist Andy Scott sat down with The Metal Voice and recalled the call he got from the Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx.
“Back in the early 80’s I got a phone call in the middle of the night and some guy was saying he was Nikki Sixx,” he shared. “Whether this is true or not I don’t know. I was telling him, ‘You have been out and had a beer and you want to call me at 4 in the morning and it is something like 8 o’clock (PM) for you. I said, ‘Why don’t you ring me at regular hours?’ He said to me, ‘You produce great records, why don’t you come and produce us?’ I said, ‘Send me an airfare and I will be over.’ Because at that point in my life, that is what I was trying to do, be a producer.”
“Then I heard a few months later someone had picked up their demos, tarted them up and released that as their first album,” the rocker said before revealing the problem with Mötley Crüe. “When he sent me the demos on cassette I thought, well first off you have to get a bass player and a drummer who can play in time with each other because that was the main thing back then. We’ve had punk but you don’t need to be like this. It can be organized, it can be tight, it can be punchy.”
Sixx tried to get Scott to produce their first album and even sent the demos to the band’s frontman. They never ended up working together because the band went with other producers.
Scott did get to see Mötley Crüe live once. However, he realized one of their songs sounded like Sweet’s ‘Hell Raiser’ when another band played the song for him.
“I can certainly see the influence on Mötley Crüe,” the rocker said during another interview. “When I was in Sweden, the guys from Europe played me one of their songs and it sounded exactly like ‘Hell Raiser.’ I think it was ‘Kickstart My Heart’ and we went to see them in Stockholm that night.”
“The Europe guys said it took them back to their childhood when they went to see the Sweet. The other thing is, Mötley Crüe’s advert said ‘Wanted: Brian Connolly Lookalike’ and they ended up with Vince Neil in the band,” he added.
The song ‘Hell Raiser’ was released in 1973 and it hit number two on the UK charts. The track inspired Mick Mars. Even though Crüe’s version is much heavier and faster, the guitar riffs in both tracks are almost identical.